Kalshi offers a variety of crypto markets, including contracts based on the price of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum: whether the price will be above or below a level, which range it will land in, how it will move over 15 minutes, how high or low it will go over a period, and more. Most crypto price markets settle on a CF Benchmarks index. Some crypto markets, such as those on blockchain events or token launches, settle on other sources named in their rules.

CF Benchmarks is a digital asset index provider authorized and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as a benchmark administrator. Its indices are used in regulated financial products, including cryptocurrency futures listed by CME Group and several U.S.-listed spot bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds. You can learn more about CF Benchmarks here.

CF Benchmarks publishes real-time indexes of cryptocurrency spot prices in U.S. dollars, each calculated from data from multiple exchanges. The rules for each of these markets name the specific index it settles on, for example the CF Bitcoin Real-Time Index (BRTI).

Kalshi uses CF Benchmarks indexes because they combine data from multiple exchanges rather than relying on a single exchange's price. A market that settles on an average over a full minute is also generally less affected by a brief spike or dip than one settled on a price at a single moment.

Not all crypto price data is the same, so a price on a single exchange or chart app can differ from the value a market settles on. For most crypto price markets, the expiration value is based on a simple average of the CF Benchmarks index over the 60 seconds before the time named in the market's rules.

Other market types work differently. For example, a 15-minute market compares the average from the minute before it closes with the average from the minute before it opened, and a market on how high or low a price will go over a period is based on averages taken throughout that period rather than a single price.

Each market's rules and the full contract terms linked from the market page govern how that market settles. If anything in this article differs from them, the market's rules and contract terms control.
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Example of a Bitcoin hourly market page. Prices and the current value update in real time; markets like this one settle on the price method indicated in their rules, not the value shown at any single moment.

CF Benchmarks index data is available through Kalshi's API as a direct pass-through: requests are forwarded to CF Benchmarks, and the index values are returned unchanged. Values retrieved after a market expires may reflect later revisions by CF Benchmarks, and the market's contract terms address how revisions are treated. To access the data or learn more, see the CF Benchmarks section of our API documentation.